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Forbes 2013 Career List Flamed By University Professors
An anonymous reader writes "The Forbes list of 'least stressful jobs' for 2013 is headlined by... university professors. This comes at a time in which the academic community has been featured on controversies about 100-hour week work journeys, doctors live on food stamps, tenured staff is laid off large science institutions, and the National Science Foundation suffers severe budget cuts, besides the well known (and sometimes publicized) politics of publish or perish. The Forbes reporter has received abundant feedback and published a shy, foot-note 'addendum'; however, the cited source, CareerCast (which does not map to any recognizable career journalist, but rather to a Sports writer), does not seem to have had the same luck. The comments of the Forbes reporter on the existence of a Summer break for graduates ('I am curious whether professors work that hard over the summer') are particularly noteworthy."
Here is the CareerCast report the article is based on, and a list of the "stress factors" they considered. The author of the Forbes article passed on a very detailed explanation of how tough a university professor's job can be.
Professors often are the type of people who stayed in college because they were afraid of going and getting a job in industry (and lets be honest, finding a job in industry is hard if you have no experience, so I don't blame them).
After I graduated, I worked for a while as a student teacher at the university. When I'd been doing it for a while, a professor came up to me and said, "Isn't this great? It's such a nice job and you get 4 months of the year for vacation!"
So yeah, there are definitely professors who are there because of the low stress, and they think their job is most stressful because they have nothing to compare it with.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Nope. I just know what I am talking about. It is natural to try to sell what you do as hard work, but it simply isn't compared with us who live from deadlines. The academic career is by far the easiest way to earn money doing very little, and using the work of others. The only problem is to enter in it, which requires a considerable amount of time and politics.
There is no rebuttal to offer save saying he lies, as everything he is saying is overblown. He exaggerates basically about every difficulty he lists. Furthermore nothing he says disagrees with my statement that you can relax and keep your job if you don't care too much about career.
You might have been modded insightful if you hadn't posted anonymously. Either way, some people must hate what you said since you're modded down to zero.
Wow, that's rough. What do you do the second week of work?